Why:I wanted to hang a map of Cleveland on a wall in my room and couldn’t find one that would suit my needs with demarcated neighborhoods - answering the question - 'where is this neighborhood at ? ', a selection of colors that I liked, in a larger size that would be suitable for printing and displaying. Ultimately, I'd like to display it as a 36'' by 30'' paper map.

Intended Audience: General public in the Cleveland area, urban planning geeks.

Data sources: For the neighborhood boundaries: community development corporations, personal research out in the field, asking residents; all other data [all roads, waterways, railroads] is from openstreetmap.org

What information is included: neighborhood names, neighborhood boundaries, all (streets, roads, alleys, etc) ways open to the general public, railroads, highways (railroads and highways play a significant role influencing the boundaries of neighborhoods, so I have included them), waterways.

Things I'd like to figure out: - How to represent subneighborhoods - neighborhoods that are geographically contained within an existing neighborhood but also have a distinct name. - Whether or not to get rid of the one way arrows on the streets. When zoomed in on a 1:1 scale on the computer, the arrows look blurry, but I don't know if that will also happen when I print it out.

TODO:- There are several neighborhoods that I have not yet added on there. - Convert the scale from metric to imperial. - Whether or not to add a North Arrow (I've read about this on here and in Gretchen's book, opinions vary). For now, I haven't added one.

As of now, the type sizes are different for neighborhood names, based on their geographic size. The smallest neighborhood name is 50 pixels.I'm wondering whether to standardize them at 1 height or not. If the height is large enough that the neighborhood's name wouldn't fit within the neighborhood boundaries, should I use arrows or how to space the names so that they are still close enough (geographically) to the actual neighborhood boundary (for example, placing the name 'warehouse district' in Lake Erie with a black line pointing to the neighborhood].

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skorasaurus

Posted 21 December 2011 - 09:58 AM

skorasaurus

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Validated Member

44 posts

Gender:Not Telling

Location:Cleveland, OH, United States

United States

Here's an update of it.

In this update:

- I added a few more neighborhoods- the neighborhood names are semi-translucent, to allow you to see the streets and other features underneath the neighborhood names [this is only visible if you zoom in on a 1:1 level, with the 10.8 PNG](I didn't figure out how to do this and until I was about to ready to finish this, so next time, I'll also do the neighborhood borders transparent too).

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DHissemGISCARTO

Posted 22 January 2012 - 02:10 PM

DHissemGISCARTO

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25 posts

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Location:Etobicoke, ON

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Hello, I rarely make comments on this forum, but will make an attempt based up the Dec 21-11 posting:

First thing that hit me is the gaps between defined ares, is there any reason that the neighbourhood boundaries could not snap to each other when they parrallel one another? The small gaps are distracting to me.

The blue schema for the neighbourhoods leads one to think of water bodies, maybe something more "earthy" or "warmer" then the illusion of water bodies as neighbourhoods.

The red lines are boundaries for? I am assuming they are district boundaries anyways... if so are they needed in this case? If they are maybe clipping to the landmass may be more appropriate; and possibly a dashed line or the equivilant that defines the red lines as boundaries like you see in county/state/international mappings.

Labels for water bodies, landmasses, and road labelling (if required) would be greatly helpful as a casual user would not know where one is if it wasn't for the text located at the top left of the visualization.

I'll be quiet after I say this one last thing. Your neighbourhoods are not matching the boundaries of (my guess) the boundaries in red... maybe snapping them to those lines would clear some things up.

Overall, the colour scheme is pleasing just address the neighbourhood colours, line gaps and some more labelling...

Keep it up!

Here's an update of it.

In this update:

- I added a few more neighborhoods- the neighborhood names are semi-translucent, to allow you to see the streets and other features underneath the neighborhood names [this is only visible if you zoom in on a 1:1 level, with the 10.8 PNG](I didn't figure out how to do this and until I was about to ready to finish this, so next time, I'll also do the neighborhood borders transparent too).

skorasaurus

Posted 26 January 2012 - 08:51 AM

Hello, I rarely make comments on this forum, but will make an attempt based up the Dec 21-11 posting:

First thing that hit me is the gaps between defined ares, is there any reason that the neighbourhood boundaries could not snap to each other when they parrallel one another? The small gaps are distracting to me.

The blue schema for the neighbourhoods leads one to think of water bodies, maybe something more "earthy" or "warmer" then the illusion of water bodies as neighbourhoods.

The red lines are boundaries for? I am assuming they are district boundaries anyways... if so are they needed in this case? If they are maybe clipping to the landmass may be more appropriate; and possibly a dashed line or the equivilant that defines the red lines as boundaries like you see in county/state/international mappings.

Labels for water bodies, landmasses, and road labelling (if required) would be greatly helpful as a casual user would not know where one is if it wasn't for the text located at the top left of the visualization.

I'll be quiet after I say this one last thing. Your neighbourhoods are not matching the boundaries of (my guess) the boundaries in red... maybe snapping them to those lines would clear some things up.

Overall, the colour scheme is pleasing just address the neighbourhood colours, line gaps and some more labelling...

Keep it up!

Thank you very much for the feedback and the encouragement !

1. Good to know. Since I manually traced the neighborhood boundaries, this is something I'll need to improve upon in my next update. 2. I initially chose that color scheme because I wanted a 3-tone selection that would be still be distinguishable for the colorblind and it was one of the swatches that colorbrewer gave back. In my first couple drafts, I actually did not even have the Lake in it (because of a bug with the software that I was using) and then I realized it was necessary to have the Lake and the map would look a whole lot better.

Only a couple weeks ago [and after I had posted both drafts here], I found out that Brewer, and Krygier and Wood; recommend that different values of the same hues (or shades of the same color, which is what I did in this map) should only be used for quantitative data, which my map is not. Not sure yet whether I'll change the colors.

3. Yes, the red lines are the administrative borders/boundaries for the city of Cleveland. There are 3 separate instances, of areas that aren't governed by the city of Cleveland and are either completely, or significantly surrounded by the city of Cleveland. Great suggestion on the clipping/dashed lines for the city's administrative boundaries.

4. As of now, the software library that I used to generate the road names doesn't place the text very well and I didn't to compromise the quality of the map. I thought about manually placing the names but ultimately decided not to, I didn't want to distract people while looking at it. I'll strongly consider adding Lake Erie's name to it.

5. Good point. I noticed that earlier, during the design process and wondered how to show that was the border for the city and the neighborhood ? Do you think the neighborhood boundary line should be drawn over the city boundary line such that the red city line would not be visible (as is the case for the western edge of edgewater) ? If this is the case, there'll be many instances where the city boundary line wouldn't be visible.